Duane Garren

Every time a Christian makes the news, I almost cringe. I don’t know if you caught this one, it wasn’t a sex scandal this time but two priests have been sentenced to jail time for embezzling over 8 million dollars from the same church. Not to be out done the Protestants have had their own scandals to mar their names as well, enough to garner a Wikipedia page about it.

As I think about how these stories must affect those outside the Christian faith I am heartbroken that these are the things that will grab people’s attention and reside in their memories. When people are asked why they don’t believe, they often point to such abuses as their reason. It should tear our hearts out.

But this entry isn’t about that, it is about an event I went to for a friend of mine who has cancer, Duane Garren. On March 26th at Cowan Civic Center in Lebanon, MO a benefit concert was held for Duane and his family. Duane and his wife Micki have twins Andy and Allie 2 years of age and Macy 1 year in age and as he is fond of saying they have “Einey, Meany, and Miney, there ain’t gonna be no Mo.” The concert featured Celisa Harris, The Lester's, The McCunes, Aaron Wilburn, Ascension Quartet and The New Horizons. Admission was free but a diaper shower was also advertised of size 4 and size five diapers. The response to the event was nothing short of amazing. First of all let me comment of the entertainment.

Aaron Wilburn traveled from Nashville, the Lester’s traveled from St. Louis, and the other performers traveled from their homes in the area for one reason, to honor Duane. No checks were cut to the groups, no merchandize tables we out for people to buy CDs, videos, t-shirts and the like. Their performances were amazing, singing and joking out of a compassion for their friend and love for their God, there was an unusual Spirit about the place that would be difficult to deny.

What was perhaps more surprising to me was the response from the community. I was convinced that there must be another event going on simultaneously because the parking lot to the Civic Center was so full. I was proven wrong as I entered the auditorium thirty minutes prior to the start of the show to find it packed with people already standing without a seat and every handicap area also filled. All across the stage diapers and wet wipes were already stacked higher than the monitors, providing plenty of material for Aaron Wilburn’s comedy routine. I was told it took three van loads to haul them away! All this on a Thursday night in the sleepy little town of Lebanon, MO with the NCAA basketball tournament in full swing even with Mizzou playing in the Sweet 16 for the first time in a long while. Though I admit I did see a few people peeking at their cell phones to get the scores! As the buckets were passed out this crowd of close to 700 people gave in excess of $10,200. WOW. When I heard the number I was stunned.

So what makes people get up and drive 9 hours, say no I will catch MU in the Elite 8 (which as it turns out will happen but it took faith), to go buy diapers and wipes for kids they don’t even know, all on a weeknight where many would have to get up and go to work the next morning? Love. Duane has given all of his life to ministry, traveling, singing, leading, driving buses, setting up sound, answering phone calls, and always being there to listen to people’s stories and prayer requests. People cannot help but love Duane, and this was their night to show it in a real tangible way. Every song, every applause, every diaper, every dime, was given to the Garren family in love. It was amazing.

The whole night reminded me of this verse:

John 13:34 "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other."

This is what we are to be known for, not the scandalous rubbish mentioned at the top of this post, but our love. I am not sure how much it was covered by the news media but let it be made known. For those few hours on that night, Gods love was shown in purity without any desire for remuneration. I believe in as much as we gave out of love for Duane, we gave because we are in love with Christ. We were a family coming together to support one of our own in a time of great need. It was beautiful wish you could have been there.

If you would like to offer support to Duane and his family keep him in your prayers and please send your donation to:

DUANE GARREN CANCER FUND
PO Box 256
Lebanon, MO 65536

When we live as we are called it can be said of the church that we are a beautiful body indeed!

-KDR

For Me to Live...

I have had the opportunity to give this message a few times, it has gone differently each time. It is perhaps the most challenging message I have ever given. I humbly present this and would love your thoughts. - KR

A few weeks ago I got a message from Kyle, a young man who was in my youth group. He has been wrestling with scripture, and as a young adult whose friends are off doing other things and he has been growing deep in his own faith. So from time to time we have these little thread discussions on Facebook, that are amazing. I am thrilled to have these types of conversations, it gets my own mind working, and his last question was a good one.

This is what he sent out:

So I'm reading through a million different verses and this one I just can't quite get my mind around. I was wondering if any of you guys could offer and insight as to what exactly they mean by "to live is Christ" For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Philippians 1:21 (NIV)

What a great question! How many times have you just glanced over this question, Paul makes a huge statement here in just a few words. He actually uses Jesus as an adjective to describe life here, which is just fascinating. Usually when people look at these verses they describe, as my friend Dan did, the meaning here to be something along the lines of Paul identifying with Christ’s call so much that it was all consuming, and that death would be a good thing because of the promise we have in heaven. I had always seen it this way, and believe that is still a good explanation of this verse. But something challenged me to dig a little deeper. Because if we really want to understand what is going on here we really have to know who Paul is, not just what he has done.

Anyone who has been a believer for just 10 minutes, knows that Paul is one of the major authors of the Bible, and one of the most eloquent and important theologians of the early church. As Christians we study his works, his words are quoted at weddings, and are known the world over, very few people have ever had the level of influence that was given to Paul. But what we miss or seem to forget is that Paul wasn’t always Paul.

To get a good barometer on Paul we need to go back in your Bibles to the left just a bit to the book of Acts. Start in Chapter 6, where are we find not Paul but a man chosen to minister by the Disciples named Stephen who was described as (Acts 6:8) “a man full of God's grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people” so this is what he was known for. No doubt that he was known as this by believers and non believers alike. Towards the end of chapter six we see that Stephen was accused before the Sanhedrin of blasphemy against Moses and against God, and that they even brought false witnesses in to tell lies about the alleged blasphemy. After all the charges had been laid down all the evidence presented they looked to Stephen to present his case and Luke, the writer of Acts writes this, “15All who were sitting in the Sanhedrin looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” In the middle of all these lies and accusations, and you really couldn’t accuse anyone of any worse crime, Stephen had the look of an angel on his face. Now this wasn’t the Precious Moments chapel angel that you just want to pinch his little cheeks. I believe he has the look of someone who was experiencing incredible peace, who had supreme confidence and authority, and with that look Stephen launches into an amazing and condemning diatribe against his fellow Jews that outlines every failure of his own people from the beginning of their recorded time. He reminded them of the mistakes of their fathers and of the mistake they had made themselves with their murder of Jesus Christ. It is an amazing read, you should go home today and read Stephen’s Speech to the Sanhedrin, it is awesome and he concludes this scathing reproach with these words:

51"You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! 52Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him— 53you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it."

As you can imagine, this didn’t make the Pharisees happy, in fact, and I think this is funny that adult men are doing this, the New King James Version of the Bible tells us that they gnash their teeth at him. Which gives me this visual image of grown men trying to bite him, which is pretty weird. I’m sure if we had people biting our criminals in court you would have a lot less crime and even more people who want to avoid jury duty. “Oh man I have to bite him? Can I at least get some Ketchup?”

So they have just been handed this huge reproach and they are angry, very angry, apparently angry enough to bite, and they begin to stone Stephen, and while they are doing so, he actually forgives these men who are crushing the life out of him. Amazing, astounding, and this is how Stephen becomes the first Christian martyr. Now I know I have just spent a few minutes talking about Stephen and I am supposed to talk about Paul, but this is where we actually see Paul enter the picture for the very first time. Right here at the end of the chapter in vs, 57 and 58,

57At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, 58dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.

Before he was named Paul, Paul was called Saul, and he makes his way into the Bible by volunteering to protect the robe of his teachers from getting any blood on them. This has all the makings of the beginning of the development of a nasty villain. So who was this guy Saul?

When we look at a timeline of Paul’s life we can see right away that he was a pretty special person indeed. Paul even says of himself that he is “an Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil 3:5) He was born Saul is born into an Israelite family of the tribe of Benjamin, he is circumcised on the eighth day, in compliance with the law of God, and not only is his pedigree good, as a boy and a young man he went to rabbinical school where only the best of the best of the best, ever went on to study. But what is more Paul not only went to the best school with the best reputation he was personally taught by Gamaliel which is a big deal. Gamaliel is still considered one of the greatest teachers the Jews ever had. Gamaliel was the top Pharisee, being a student studying to be a rabbi, was a big deal, but to go to this school, and to study under this man, the Master of the Masters, you almost couldn’t imagine it. It would be like having Ozzie Smith teach you to turn a double play, Babe Ruth teaching you how to bat, Muhammad Ali teaching you to box, Michael Jordan teaching you a jump shot, Barry Bonds teaching you how to do steroids, it was that big of a deal! And it is also huge because historians tell us, and record points to one thing. This mentor of Saul’s, the man who taught him everything he knows, as it turns out was very lenient to the new Followers of the Way. And according to church history Gamaliel did convert and profess faith in Christ. There is even some speculation that the early Christians kept his conversion a secret so that Gamaliel could still retain all the influence he had from his position. Kind of the first Christian double agent. So that brings us back to Saul, holding the coats of the men who stoned Stephen.

I have often wondered how a man gets to that point where he is willing to stand by or even participate in such a brutal act of stoning a person to death. I realize that those were very brutal times but people were still people. They had to cringe as each new rock broke a bone, tore skin, or crushed a skull. But after looking into this man Saul I think I know how: we have this person who has dedicated their life to the study of scripture, following the greatest of all great teachers, and he is faced with two challenges: One is the challenge of his Rabbi, who I can only assume he sees as being weak for not crushing these new Christians right away. And he is also confronted with the power of Stephen’s reproach, and the conviction it brought with it. We see here that these two acts did not bring about repentance. Instead it only drove him into what one scholar called a murderous madness. He went on from there to persecute the church with boundless passion and zeal . He even later states in Acts 22:4 that “I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison” He was given power and authority, and resources for the specific purpose of destroying the lives of those early believers. And I believe he did it because he felt like that was the best way to really honor his God, but his heart was hard against the Holy Spirit. He truly loved not God, but power. And he lapped it up. He wanted to be the guy who was known for hunting down the Christians. He wanted to inspire awe, power and fear, and he got his wish. But while he had the pedigree, education, position and power of a devout Jewish man of God. I believe his heart was empty. I think that is why be continued to get more and more extreme because he needed to have a need met that could not be quenched. In Saul we see a man who had it all, with more to come with time, it seemed he was being courted to lead his people. But also a man who also had an evil heart that was in no way oriented toward God. This is the type of person who can hold the coats and participate in the stoning too, this is the man who can completely reject his mentor. He seemingly had it all and yet he still had nothing.

But the story doesn’t stop there with this monster. We find Saul traveling to Damascus when he is blinded by a light and he is directly confronted by Christ:

4He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
5"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.
"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. 6"Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." (Acts 9:4-9)

Saul was confronted and converted and the Bible tells us that he was blinded for three days after the experience, and while we read this as a fact of his conversion, I also read it like Paul had been in a dark room for a very long while, maybe his whole life and then suddenly he was thrust into the light. You know what that is like. You can't see for a second and if the light is bright enough you can actually even feel pain. What's more, you slowly begin to perceive more and more around you as your eyes adjust to the light. Your eyes see things they had not seen before, colors which once were so dull all of the sudden are vibrant. Light and contrasting shadow reveal textures you had only know by touch, and suddenly the room as you knew it becomes something more than you ever dreamed or imagined. As we read on Saul grew very quickly, and soon became an amazing evangelist to the very people who had commissioned him to destroy these Christ followers and eventually, eventually he became Paul. Who is a new creation, more than just the first letter of his name changed. This was a completely different person.

This was the man who traveled the whole of the Roman Empire, wrote a good portion of what we now consider scripture, he had been shipwrecked, chained, snake bit, homeless, unemployed, broke, and imprisoned, all for the sake of Christ and as he is behind bars in chains no less when Paul who was once Saul and who had the World by the tail, but who had also faced all that tribulation, makes this bold statement. “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” He had known a life consumed more by the black and white of the Law, than by the blood red Law of Love that was displayed by Christ Jesus. He has been there and done that with the life that was almost, or pretty good, or his best effort, and had still left him broken, empty and dark inside. But when he met Jesus, immediately he had found what he was looking for.

So when Paul says to live is Christ, I think he is saying, that there is a difference between existing and functioning in life and really living. Paul so identified with Christ that he found every good thing about life in his Savior. All his joy, all his comfort, all his rest, all his hope, all the things he had so passionately sought after but had never found were suddenly revealed when he found them in Christ. And for Paul the only thing that could be better than experiencing the presence of God in his everyday life, would be to actually be in his presence in Heaven. I believe Paul was a passionate man and living Christ, ignited and fed his passion and zeal for life like nothing else could. And that that is what he meant when he wrote to live is Christ. I don’t even want to think about that other way to live. Because that’s not really living. In fact this life Jesus Christ offers is so good that death would only make it better, so I don’t have to be afraid of that most basic of all human fears. Paul was a man totally consumed with love for his savior. I hope I can follow in his example. But what do we do with this today? How would you answer that question? For me to live is….What?

For me live is…Hunting and Fishing…shopping…struggling in my pain…presenting this front to the world around me… being busy…pursuit of prosperity and status… what is it for you? What is that thing that is all consuming for you, that monster whose appetite you just can’t really quench?

When Paul wrote for me to live is Christ, he wasn’t being cute, he wasn’t being challenging, he wasn’t being comical. He was making a statement about the all consuming nature of worship, and I’m not talking about music. Worship is how we live all of our lives, every aspect, and Paul was saying that I feel the most alive when all of my being is focused on God and living under his direction. That is what it means to really live, but how many of us can say that we share that level of intensity for Jesus?

We were made to worship, to be consumed by an all consuming God. To live and breathe with passion, to know one desire and to have it met by Him, and we can never experience all the fullness of life that God has for us unless we give our lives over completely. But be warned, it is easy to be mistaken as to whether or not you are actually doing that. I believe Saul would have said every inch of his being was consumed by God, but he was wrong. He was like the people who he wrote to Timothy about who were:

“lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5having a form of godliness but denying its power.” (2 Tim 3:2-5)

They just didn’t quite get it. Sometimes I don’t either. The terrible temptation of a minister is the same temptation of a parent, and it is that sometimes you feel like you have to have all the answers. That you have to present this life without blemish, and it can get overwhelming at times. Keeping up fronts and living lies is always tiring. Aren’t you thankful that we are not commanded to do that at all. Aren’t you thankful that Christian Perfection is more of a heart attitude than a perfect performance record. This same Paul who said to live is Christ is the same man who wrote this to the Galatian Church talking about this very issue:

“the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:22-24

These are the things we are to pursue as we live these lives out in worship of our Great and Gracious God. I have never felt guilty for seeking peace, I have never been reprimanded for being kind. I have never been scolded for being gentle. I have been hurt when love has been rejected, I have felt out of place when others did not share my joy, I have had goodness returned to me with malice. I like you have experienced pain. And I have questioned whether or not it is worth it. Is living life with this type and level of intensity even possible? What does a life look like that can say:

For me to live is Christ?

For me to live is Christ-

For me to live is Christ-

For me to live is Christ And to die is gain.

It is my belief that we are all called to this level of relationship, you do not have to be some super Christian. This is the life that God has for all of us, and there can be no better way to live. But so much of the time we come up short. Sometimes I feel like I need a Damascus road experience for myself. Living this Christ life does require sacrifice, to lay down our own lives and pick up the cross on a daily basis. It does require us to embrace surrender. These are not easy things to do, and I cannot truly do them of my own accord. I pray that I may not be so blinded by my pride, that I am unable to see the truth. I pray that I may never be so hard set upon my understanding of what is right and pleasing to God that I miss when God calls me into the deeper water. I pray that in the life I live I might have the humility to say in truth that for me, like it was with Paul, that for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.